Customer Effort is a measurement of how easy a business is for consumers to engage with.

The metric provides a deep understanding of a brand’s customer service, offering more robust insight into the effectiveness of a company’s customer experience than other metrics, such as NPS.

We believe that Effort makes up 30% of customer loyalty. The great news for brands is that every building block that influences a positive Effort score is completely under your control.

The results

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The Results

Here are the Customer Effort Index rankings by sector and region, then the top brands in the UK, US and Australia by sector. Look for the starburst icon for overall Effort scores.

Customer Effort: The Markets View

Telecommunications

Australia

Financial Services

Australia

Technology Retail

Australia

Top brands in the US

Telecommunications

Financial Services

Technology Retail

Top brands in the UK

Telecommunications

Financial Services

Technology Retail

Top brands in Australia

Telecommunications

Financial Services

Technology Retail

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Chris Dillon

Editor-in-Chief,
Customer Effort Index

Inside Track

Welcome to the 2025’s first edition of the Customer Effort Index.

Our regular visitors will notice that the Customer Effort Index has had a slight facelift – but what hasn’t changed is the depth of the data, our methodology, and the validity of the findings.

We’re delighted to bring you another great set of Customer Effort scores and it’s fascinating to see the movers and shakers in this quarter’s set.

This wave sees two new Customer Effort market leaders – USAA Bank in Financial Services in the US, Samsung in Technology Retail in the UK. Congratulations to Apple, T-Mobile, Vodafone (twice!), Nationwide, Bendigo and Office Works for another quarter.

This year we want to hear from you, the CX leaders working for the brands covered by the index and analysts writing about these sectors. We want to know what you find surprising about CEI data and how you’re using Customer Effort in 2025.

Your stories will help us power the CEI throughout 2025. We can't wait to hear from you.

How it Works

The Customer Effort Index is based on interviews with 18,000 consumers across the UK, US and Australia each year.

In-depth surveys ask respondents to rate their most recent interaction with a brand according to several dimensions e.g. “making me feel valued as a customer” and “having details explained clearly to you”.

These are then tallied to form our four pillars within Customer Effort: (1) Knowledge & Expertise (2) Style of Communication (3) Speed solving the problem (4) Valuing the Customer.

Responses are collected online.

About the Customer Effort Index

NICE believes that a great customer experience is an effortless one, where life is made as easy as possible for the customer. NICE commissioned the Customer Effort Index to measure how real people perceive the effort it takes to be a customer of some of the leading brands in the world. By enabling a comparison of effort not only within an industry, but across industries, we can identify and learn from the brands who lead on making it easy for their customers to do business with them.